Canaria
by Rat-chan
Summary: Post Empty House AU. Holmes' supposed loss had taken a greater toll on Watson than either man realized. After the return, Watson decides that he will not lose his friend again, and takes desperate measures to keep Holmes from harm.


**Disclaimer: **Not needed. Hurray for public domain!

**Notes/warnings: **This is something I wrote months ago for a kinkmeme prompt. I actually hated this fic for a while because it came out (as I thought) too melodramatic. I have since come to appreciate it more and have finally gotten around to posting it here...  
This is on the dark side and includes drugging/poisoning...

* * *

I looked down at the sofa in the sitting room of 221B Baker Street. There slept Sherlock Holmes, the world's only consulting detective – and my dearest friend. His long, thin (_thinner than I remember_) limbs were splayed all over one arm and the back of the sofa, except for one arm, which cradled his precious violin. He had fallen asleep while absently playing wistful chords, clearly rejoicing in his reunion with the beloved instrument. His bow lay fallen beside the sofa. I bent down, picked it up, and set it on Holmes's usual chair. Then, I went to retrieve the instrument. I knelt down beside the sofa—

And paused, attention caught by the slow rise and fall of the violin as it moved in time with Holmes's breathing. The wood of its frame glowed warmly in the lamplight on each intake of breath and dulled again as it fell into shadow as the air was expelled. Instead of taking the violin as I had originally intended, my hands moved almost instinctively to Holmes's face and neck. My right hand moved lightly to his carotid, seeking the throb of his pulse. My left hand hovered over around his mouth and nose to catch the moist air currents of his exhaled breath.

_Here,_ the strong steady beat of his pulse told me. _Alive,_ was the silent proclamation of his breath. Still, I was not reassured – could not yet allow myself to believe it. I might still wake up, alone in my own empty house.

I shifted my fingers to curl around his neck and cup one cheek. Slowly, I moved my face closer to his and ever so softly, I pressed my lips against his. _Warm, soft, corporeal._

Holmes stirred at my touch, and reluctantly I drew back. Deciding he would likely wake if I took the violin from him now, I rose without taking it. _I should get him a blanket, _I thought and turned to move around the settee and to his bedroom.

Whiteness flashed in my peripheral vision and I turned further to gaze at the waxy likeness of my sleeping friend. My eyes were instantly pulled to the hole the bullet had cut straight through the head. Moran was indeed an excellent marksman – that shot would have been instantly fatal had it been the real Holmes it struck. _To have regained and then lost him on the same day! It would have destroyed me…_

Sick with remembered loneliness and fear, I felt my knees give way. I stumbled into the chair that faced the sofa and cast my gaze to my still slumbering companion.

No… Only the loneliness was remembered – that wrenching, breathtaking heartache that had led me to spend my days desperately seeking some echo of my life with Holmes.

The fear, however, was not a memory. It was even now whitening the knuckles of my tight fists and causing my breath to shudder out of trembling lips.

_I could still lose him again…_

Every new case he undertook would bring him a new enemy – a new threat to his life. And as long as there was breath in his body and strength in his limbs, he would seek new cases.

_As long as there was strength in his limbs…_

My mind seized upon that one thought and, in the habit I had made in those empty years of emulating Holmes's reasoning, followed it to its logical conclusion.

There was only one way to keep Sherlock Holmes safe and with me. I stood up and moved to the rack of chemicals that stood over the table Holmes used for his experiments. Mrs. Hudson had taken excellent care of the room – there was little dust obscuring the labels of the bottles on the rack. There were many poisons amongst them, but I could not find any that would suit my purpose.

Then, my questing eyes came upon a bottle labeled "extract of _Bufo_ toad venom." With trembling fingers, I took up the poison. _Steady yourself, man! _I imposed my almost forgotten military discipline on my unquiet nerves and set to work preparing two solutions of the venom: one for injection now and one for ingestion in the morning. With the right doses at the right times, Holmes would be weakened and bedridden… but alive.

Finished with my preparations, I then took up Holmes's own syringe and filled it with the intravenous solution. I returned to the settee with it in hand and looked down at the sleeping form of my dearest friend.

"I'm sorry," I whispered, "but there's no other way." I knelt once more beside the sofa and held the syringe to his neck. It was dangerous, of course, to inject drugs there, but my experience in the fields of battle had given me the knack of it. I carefully plunged the tip of the needle into the smooth white flesh and pushed down the stopper. I then swiftly pulled it back – before the thrashing of Holmes's awakening could cause it to do damage – and hid the incriminating item behind my back.

With an indistinct cry of pain, the detective's eyes snapped open.

I quickly brought my free hand to his face and made soft shushing noises. "It was just a dream, Holmes. Go back to sleep."

"A dream? I was not dreaming, my dear Watson…" His voice trailed off and the momentary sharp focus of his eyes went vague and languid. "I think I am dreaming now, though… So many colors…"

The hallucinogens in the venom were already doing their work even as the other toxins and the weak sedative I had added to the mix quickly pushed his weary mind and body back into slumber. His eyes rolled back and closed and all tension left his body. I caught the violin before it could fall to the floor. I placed it and the syringe on the chair with the bow and turned my attention back to Holmes.

I rearranged the now boneless splay of his limbs to more comfortable positions on the settee. This finished, I lay my hands and head upon his chest, my face turned toward his. Of their own volition, my fingers curled in the fabric of his dressing gown.

"I can't lose you again, my dear Holmes."

_I won't lose you again._

_

* * *

_

Over the next weeks, I painstakingly dosed Holmes with a solution of _Bufo_ venom morning, noon, and night. Claiming loneliness in my own home, I moved back into our rooms at Baker Street. There, I could easily slip the poison into his food, or administer intravenous doses during moments of insensibility. At first, I dared not make the doses too strong, for I knew not how his body would react. Also, I feared that, with his intimate knowledge of drugs and poisons, he would recognize the action of the venom on his mind and body.

He did not, somehow. So, over those weeks, I gradually increased the dose, and soon enough, he was experiencing prolonged periods of drowsiness. On many nights, he woke both of us by screaming at nightmares. I would hold him as he stammered out names like Moriarty and Reichenbach. I would stroke his sweat-dampened hair and whisper heart-felt promises of safety until he fell back into slumber. I relished the closeness of those moments, and yet, I would feel the most inexplicable twinge in my breast.

He complained of visual disturbances, nausea and periods of hallucination. "It may be some type of migraine," I told him in those first days. "Yet the hallucinations worry me." Concern for his well-being could now take the place of loneliness as my reason for spending so much time with him. Every moment I did not begrudgingly spend attending to patients in my surgery, I spent with him.

On one evening, I asked him to play his violin for me, and he smilingly obliged. Oh, how I had missed that smile! And the sound of his violin. He knew my tastes so exactly that it seemed the bittersweet chords caressed my ears on their way to embracing my mind.

"Don't take that away from me again," I begged him later that night after the latest dose of venom had taken effect.

Over time, Holmes found it harder and harder to travel any farther from his bed than our sitting room. He was quickly fatigued and began to complain of irregularities in his heartbeat. I discouraged him from too much work or excitement. When Lestrade or any other such insidious influence called, I assured them that Holmes's failing health would permit no more than quiet consultation. It was, after all, true in its way.

"I'm afraid so many years using cocaine have done this, Holmes," I told him after one such visit from the inspector had left both men disappointed – Lestrade from lack of results, and Holmes from inability to even think as clearly as formerly. "The hallucinations, the pulse irregularities… everything."

I was not sure he believed me, but he did not argue. Of course, it was possible he did not have the strength. There was a strange, yet somehow familiar look in his eyes as he curled up on the settee, still trying to puzzle unsuccessfully through the case on which the inspector had consulted him. The longer he lay there, the more pronounced the look became, until I finally recognized it.

_Fear, _was my shocked realization. I had seen it in his eyes maybe twice before, but never so strong. I went swiftly to the sofa and knelt down beside him, placing a hand on his head. "I will treat you, my dear Holmes," I reassured him. "Together, we will get through this."

_Whatever else, he is here with me, _I reassured my own heart, whose inexplicable twisting was at that moment paining me.

That evening, though, and the next day, I decreased the dose of the _Bufo_ venom. The following night, after many nights of being unable or too tired to play, he took up his violin. He did not play any tune, but, per his habits of old, began playing random chords.

These, however, were not the musing tones or the contemplative strains of former years. The chords began slow and melancholic, but progressed into a tuneless lament, as if some mythical beast had come into 221B Baker Street to melodically wail its grief.

"Stop," I cried out, finally, no longer able to listen to the heartrending sounds. The pain they were causing me was physically real.

Holmes lowered his violin slowly and met my eyes. His gaze was the sharpest I had seen it in weeks, yet the expression in it was entirely unknown to me.

"Do you know me, Watson?" he asked me after an interminable minute of silence.

"What?" I could not understand his question.

"I asked, quite clearly, if you knew me." His gaze did not waver for an instant.

"You are Sherlock Holmes," I answered, still lost as to his meaning.

"And what makes me Sherlock Holmes?"

Inexplicably, I wanted to flee from this conversation, but his gaze held me riveted. I could not identify that look in his eyes. The English language, with all its redundancy of words, seemed to have not one that described their expression.

"You are…" I finally began, but struggled to continue. "You are the world's… only…" I stopped again, some strange feeling blocking my throat. "You are the grea—" This time, I actually choked on the words.

"I am having trouble hearing you, Watson. Do come closer." It was phrased as a request, but his gaze commanded me. I rose unsteadily to my feet and took hesitant steps to his side. "Would you be so good as to kneel down so we may converse face to face?" I collapsed down to my knees and lowered my gaze to the carpet, but Holmes set aside his violin in order to reach out with a trembling hand and grip my chin. He forced my eyes back up to meet his own. When the eye contact was restored, his hand dropped away bonelessly. "I know," he whispered to me.

Just two words uttered in the softest possible tone, and yet they struck me like a blow. I found it difficult to breath and a rushing sound seemed to fill my ears. "You… know?"

"My dear Watson, even someone as bumbling and slow as Inspector Lestrade could have deduced that he was being poisoned." I felt light headed and ill, my mind and my head seeming to spin in opposite directions. "I will not ask you why. I will only repeat my previous question: what makes me Sherlock Holmes."

I opened my mouth, but at the harsh, pained sound that came out, swiftly closed it again.

"Those two identities you tried to give me before: do they fit me now?" I lowered my head and squeezed my eyes shut, trying desperately to escape the look in those eyes. "Am I any kind of detective now?"His voice had become much stronger now, louder. I tried to raise my hands to cover my ears, but he gripped my wrists. The trembling of his hands began to shake my arms as well. "Am I a great anything?" He very nearly shouted the question, the emotion that had filled his gaze now spilling out in his voice.

"You are alive!" I cried out finally, shaking off his grip so that I could clutch the fabric of his dressing gown. I pressed my face into my fists over his lap. A dark, spiky, acrid mass that had been lodged below my breast, ignored, for months seemed to finally tear free. It burned my throat like bile and stung my eyes like smoke. "You are here and you are alive!" I could not recognize myself in the high, quavering exclamation. I opened my mouth, wanting to say more, but all that would come out was a hitched breath.

Distantly, I felt his hands on my shoulders. "Oh, my dear friend!" It was the softest tone I had ever heard from him. More of those sharp, whining breaths shook me and I felt unaccountable moisture on my clenched fists. "I'm so sorry."

"Dear God, I missed you so!" The words howled out of me without my willing them, wilder and more rough-edged from the weeks of holding them back. I could say no more after that as I was reduced to those crow-like crying gasps.

I felt the grip on my shoulders shift and tighten and something hard and warm rested atop my head. "I missed you, too, my dear, dear friend." The voice sounded very close to my ears. "And I'm so very sorry." I barely heard him over my own sobs. "No man can promise not to die, but I swear to you that I will not willingly leave you again."

I dissolved completely then, wrapping my arms around his waist and giving full vent to those racking sobs. And Sherlock Holmes held me with all his remaining strength as I cried out three long, empty years of grief.


End file.
